The Dalmatian Madonna

ONE summer, soon after the war, I found myself staying at Ragusa, a small, picturesque town on the Dalmatian coast. Having discovered that the private chapel which Ivan Mestrovic, the famous Serbian sculptor, was designing and erecting for a wealthy Jugoslav family was not many miles away, my traveling companion, a Serbian, and I decided to go to see it.

We rose early that morning, for the bus which ran down the coast from Ragusa to Cattaro left at seven, and there was only one bus daily. Stealing down the thickly carpeted stairs of the sleeping hotel, past the yawning night porter, through the garden, and across the road, we reached the small Square, where, even at that early hour, a waiter was opening a café. There were two cafés in this Square: at night a male orchestra played at one, while the rival café opposite employed a ladies’ orchestra for its patrons. I had seen Mestrovic sitting in the latter café one evening.

The waiter brought us coffee with surprising quickness; but as we lifted the welcome cups to our lips the warning honk-honk of the bus came to our ears. So, gulping down as much hot black coffee as we conveniently could, — meanwhile thrusting notes into the waiter’s hand, — we fled across the Square, rushed round the corner, and literally threw ourselves into the already-filled bus as it moved off.

It was a typical Adriatic-coast summer morning — warm and balmy, with a promise of noonday heat in the air. As the bus sailed gayly up the dusty coast road, — the insouciant Slav driver taking perilous curves with a splendid disregard for danger, — down below, to our right, the green-blue waters of the sea lay placid in the morning sunshine beneath the pale blue Adriatic sky. For a Northerner it was an eternally exciting spectacle of beauty, but to the tight-lipped, dullfaced peasants, sitting pressed against us in the bus, it must have been merely the monotonous landscape of a life of hardship and toil.

Sometimes the bus would pause in its headlong course, pulling up sharply to pass a slow-moving cart driven by a bandit of a man in crimson blouse and wide royal-blue breeches, or a stubborn donkey, on which would be seated a very dignified little peasant woman balanced delightfully beneath her wide white headdress.

Where the road branched off to Ragusa Vecchia, our destination, we were forced to alight. The bus stopped; we got out, and it whizzed off again, leaving us enveloped in a cloud of dust. When this cleared we found ourselves before a kind of small roadside inn. Our thoughts ran back to the hastily gulped morning coffee; we decided to have some more, and entered the inn.

It was a deserted place. Heaven knows who patronized it. Judging by the interior, not many people passed that way, or entered the inn. A small front room, a couple of tables and some chairs set out for customers, a counter, a few semi-bare shelves, half a dozen melancholy-looking bottles — that was all. We had little hope of getting anything to drink here. But out of a side room came a young woman to attend to our wants, and my Serbian companion, who did all the talking, ordered some coffee. She assured us that we could have it.

As my companion turned to talk to me — we were speaking German — I was able to observe the young woman, and was amazed at her unusual beauty. She had the Slav Madonna type of face, longishly oval in shape, with the warm, full-brimming brown eyes of the Balkan Slav, and full, graceful red lips set against deathly pale cheeks. I was astonished to see her in that dismal hole of a deserted inn. And as she went to execute our order I gazed with intense curiosity at her disappearing slender figure. What is she doing here, where she obviously does n’t belong, I asked myself. And as I abstractedly answered the vivacious chatter of the Serbian, my thoughts speculated on the young woman and her mystery.

Suddenly she was back with us. And suddenly she addressed me directly in English, saying, surprisingly: ‘You’re American, are n’t you?’ to which I replied: ‘No, I’m English. But, may I ask, where did you learn to speak English?’

I was surprised and yet not really surprised. For her sudden plunge into my own language, which she spoke fluently, — subtly transforming my Serbian friend, who did n’t know a word of English, into a momentary outsider, — merely confirmed my own vague ideas about the young woman. So there was a mystery after all; there was a story, then! She was not just the ordinary peasant girl of the district. My instinctive interest in human beings was aroused. And while we waited for our coffee, and while we eventually sipped it with luxurious slowness, she unfolded, bit by bit, her pathetic story. It was simple and uncomplicated, human and true.

She had been born in California, to which far country her parents had emigrated about thirty years before. She had been brought up in California, and had gone to school there. Just as she was fourteen, a schoolgirl ready for high school, — in 1910, to be exact, — her parents, having had enough of the Paradise on the shores of the Pacific, returned to their native land. And for twelve years — it was now 1922 — the young woman had languished in this forsaken but beautiful spot. She might have had a vague chance of returning to the land of her birth before the war, but 1914 and the subsequent years destroyed any hopes in that direction. Her only brother had been killed in the war, and she was now the only living child of her aging parents.

With a vastly different background from that of the bulk of the country people with whom she mixed, she was still, surprisingly, single at twenty-six, an age when most girls of her country were already married and mothers of children. For twelve years she had pined for the American scene, for the places she had known as a child, for the opportunities which she would have known there. She mourned the fact that while her schoolgirl friends were now secretaries and stenographers in banks and business offices, she was still a household drudge amid this sickly, frugal peasant life. She showed us the rotogravure sections of the American papers which someone sent her regularly, her voice trailing off into a weary, hopeless whine, picked up from the native peasant intonation, as she gazed with envy on the dazzling pictures of loveliness and beauty displayed therein. When I asked her timidly why she did n’t marry one of the local swains, she replied with a pathetic shrug of her thin shoulders and a wry smile. Her thin voice, speaking its unaccustomed language, was filled with infinite hopelessness. She was worn out with waiting, and although young in age her spirit had grown old and querulous in the shadow of unlived years. She was like a character out of a Chekhov play — beautiful, futile, charming, and frustrated.

When we left the dim gloom of the inn and the weary voice of the young woman behind, it seemed as if the whole painful travail of human existence had been unrolled before us. We turned our back on it — outside, Life called. The hot yellow sunshine seemed gay; in the distance was the beckoning sea. We walked hurriedly down the road toward the shore, quickly throwing off the mood of depression which the young woman’s story had induced, until we ran for joy and shouted to each other nonsensically in German, a language foreign to both of us, finally racing madly down the deserted country road into the village of Ragusa Vecchia.

The Mestrovic chapel, then in course of construction, was at the very end of the village, placed on the top of a small hill, looking right across the sea, its walls rising in beauty and grace against a natural background of dark trees and flame-shaped cypresses. It was approached by a narrow path which led upward from the shore road; up this awkward way the workmen had to haul the heavy building materials. All morning long we wandered round the unfinished chapel, watching the quiet workers as they toiled among their materials. All was gray — dust gray, light gray. We gazed with suitable awe and reverence at the multitude of Madonnas gradually covering the grayish walls — they were everywhere. These Mestrovic Madonnas, with their longishly oval patient faces, eternally waiting for the urgent miracle of life to awaken them out of their hopeless trance, were worlds apart from the warm, radiant Madonnas of Botticelli in Florence, whose lambent quattrocento faces bloomed like flowers.

Noon came, bringing with it lunch, and afterward we lay down on the shore and slept, waking in mid-afternoon to hire a small boat which we rowed round the little peninsula. Exploring every small alley and corner of the village, we passed a glorious day in vivid forgetfulness of the young woman of the inn; and duly caught the evening bus back to Ragusa before twilight began to fall.

But we were not allowed to forget the young woman altogether, for, looking out of the bus windows along the coast road, we saw her waving to us, a virginal figure now, for she was wearing a long white dress which made her look like a young girl as we went flying along. In one hand she held a small bunch of flowers, but the speed at which we were going prevented us from seeing more than a fleeting smile of gratitude. We waved back, frantically. No doubt she had waited, hopefully, expecting to see us once again before we returned to Ragusa. As we went dashing round a corner she disappeared from view.

It was the last I saw of her, for I never went that way again. But I have often wondered what has happened to her. Has she married, giving up all hope of ever getting back to America? Or, now being thirtyfour, is she a bitter old maid losing all her looks? Or did she ever escape from the Dalmatian coast and come to America?

It was not until we were in the train next day, on route for Serajevo and Belgrade, that the sudden realization why the face of the young woman formed such a strong visual image in my mind came to me: her Slav Madonna face was identical with the face of the Mestrovic Madonna, moulded in the same lines, instinct with the same racial beauty. Life and art were fused in her longishly oval face. The idea made me smile. It was a happy one.